Jacob's Room eBook

The lamps of London uphold the dark as upon the points
of burning bayonets. The yellow canopy sinks
and swells over the great four-poster. Passengers
in the mail-coaches running into London in the eighteenth
century looked through leafless branches and saw it
flaring beneath them. The light burns behind
yellow blinds and pink blinds, and above fanlights,
and down in basement windows. The street market
in Soho is fierce with light. Raw meat, china
mugs, and silk stockings blaze in it. Raw voices
wrap themselves round the flaring gas-jets. Arms
akimbo, they stand on the pavement bawling—­Messrs.
Kettle and Wilkinson; their wives sit in the shop,
furs wrapped round their necks, arms folded, eyes
contemptuous. Such faces as one sees. The
little man fingering the meat must have squatted before
the fire in innumerable lodging-houses, and heard
and seen and known so much that it seems to utter itself
even volubly from dark eyes, loose lips, as he fingers
the meat silently, his face sad as a poet’s,
and never a song sung. Shawled women carry babies
with purple eyelids; boys stand at street corners;
girls look across the road—­rude illustrations,
pictures in a book whose pages we turn over and over
as if we should at last find what we look for.
Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house,
and dark square is a picture feverishly turned—­in
search of what? It is the same with books.
What do we seek through millions of pages? Still
hopefully turning the pages—­ oh, here is
Jacob’s room.

He sat at the table reading the Globe. The pinkish
sheet was spread flat before him. He propped
his face in his hand, so that the skin of his cheek
was wrinkled in deep folds. Terribly severe he
looked, set, and defiant. (What people go through
in half an hour! But nothing could save him.
These events are features of our landscape. A
foreigner coming to London could scarcely miss seeing
St. Paul’s.) He judged life. These pinkish
and greenish newspapers are thin sheets of gelatine
pressed nightly over the brain and heart of the world.
They take the impression of the whole. Jacob
cast his eye over it. A strike, a murder, football,
bodies found; vociferation from all parts of England
simultaneously. How miserable it is that the
Globe newspaper offers nothing better to Jacob Flanders!
When a child begins to read history one marvels, sorrowfully,
to hear him spell out in his new voice the ancient
words.

The Prime Minister’s speech was reported in
something over five columns. Feeling in his pocket,
Jacob took out a pipe and proceeded to fill it.
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed.
Jacob took the paper over to the fire. The Prime
Minister proposed a measure for giving Home Rule to
Ireland. Jacob knocked out his pipe. He was
certainly thinking about Home Rule in Ireland—­a
very difficult matter. A very cold night.

The snow, which had been falling all night, lay at
three o’clock in the afternoon over the fields
and the hill. Clumps of withered grass stood
out upon the hill-top; the furze bushes were black,
and now and then a black shiver crossed the snow as
the wind drove flurries of frozen particles before
it. The sound was that of a broom sweeping—­sweeping.